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Tyranny developer video focuses on stylizing art in an evil world

Just what goes into creating the look and feel of a world where most goodness has been beaten.

Obsidian Entertainment has been pushing forward with its next isometric RPG, Tyranny, focusing on a world where evil has taken over the world, except for a small pocket of hope. In the second of its behind-the-scenes developer videos, we get a glimpse at the minds of the artists and how they envisioned the world that is being created.

"It's war torn and oppressed, but with the art style, we tried to create a little bit of levity with that," Art Director Brian Menze said of the world. The video goes into not only world design, but character design and animation as well.

Even the music gets a spotlight. "What I'm most interested in when writing the music for a score is the people that live in this world and inhabit this world because that is really what gives it its humanity," said Audio Director Justin Bell. "The game has the potential to veer to some heavy territory, and we wanted to avoid that with the music wherever possible. So it's sort of this cognitive dissonance where we have created music that by itself can be beautiful."

John Keefer

Contributing Editor

John Keefer is a curmudgeon that has been in journalism for 35 years, the last 16 in the video games industry. He loves real-time strategy games and prefers old-school Total Annihilation to StarCraft. He also loves isometric RPGs, and has been addicted to World of Warcraft for more than 10 years. He sucks at shooters and multiplayer and is purely a PC guy. And being a former member of Shack, he also likes Chatty. Go figure.